Earth may have 'hairy' dark matter, says NASA

Washington: There may be long filaments of dark matter or 'hair' on our Earth, suggests new research, adding further study is needed to unlock the mysteries of the nature of dark matter on Blue Marble.

Dark matter is an invisible, mysterious substance that makes up about 27 percent of all matter and energy in the universe.

The regular matter, which makes up everything we can see around us, is only five percent of the universe.

According to previous calculations and simulations performed in the last decade, dark matter forms 'fine-grained streams' of particles that move at the same velocity and orbit galaxies such as ours.

"A stream can be much larger than the solar system itself and there are many different streams crisscrossing our galactic neighbourhood," said Gary Prezeau from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

He found that when a dark matter stream goes through a planet, the stream particles focus into an ultra-dense filament or 'hair' of dark matter. Hairs emerging from planets have both 'roots', the densest concentration of dark matter particles in the hair, and 'tips' where the hair ends.

When particles of a dark matter stream pass through the Earth's core, they focus at the 'root' of a hair, where the density of the particles is about a billion times more than average.